


Late Night Travels

by localfreak



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Man Out of Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 15:57:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1232425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/localfreak/pseuds/localfreak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short piece set Post-The Avengers movie. Steve finds solitude and inaction difficult to handle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Late Night Travels

**Author's Note:**

> Additional notes: It has come to my attention some of my fic has been uploaded to a website I do not trust. I would like to make it abundantly clear I do not give permission for my work to be shared on any other website (linking to my fic's URL is fine), or uploaded anywhere without my knowledge and expressed permission. Quite frankly, if I want to upload it somewhere I'll do it myself.

‘Excuse me, Captain Rogers, but you requested I alert you when it reached midnight if you had not already gone to bed.’

Steve looked up from his sketchbook and stretched. ‘Thanks, Jarvis,’ he said in the general direction of the ceiling, forcing a polite smile. It never stopped being weird- speaking to a voice without a body. Steve padded his way towards the bathroom and sighed. He still wasn’t tired enough, he knew, but he had to sleep. He had to at least try to rest and make his brain turn off or he’d be in no condition to fight if they were called to an emergency.

 

But he was tired of exercising in the gym, tired of sketching, tired of reading.

 

Steve was no stranger to boredom but everyone else in the tower seemed to have things to do except him. He felt, aimless. Useless.

 

‘You’ll be useless if you don’t go to bed,’ he told himself firmly, splashing water on his face then brushing his teeth.

 

The bed was luxury. There was no other word for it –some nights, well, most nights, it was almost too comfortable for him- he wasn’t used to that sort of thing, it made it hard for him to forget where he was, hard for him not to start cataloguing the difference between his past and present.

 

Steve closed his eyes and thought of Bucky. He still hadn’t been out to Arlington, where the stones- if not all of the bodies- of the commandoes lay. SHIELD still kept him on a long leash, and Steve didn’t much like the idea of a SHIELD agent or two following along for the ride and then reporting back how he would react- not when he didn’t know himself how he would.

 

Really, the grave shouldn’t make a difference. Just another stone, but Steve wasn’t fool enough to think that just because it shouldn’t affect him so much. Certainly it shouldn’t affect him as much as the pang in his belly when he smelt cheap cigarettes, coffee that had thickened in the bottom of the machine so it was thick enough to stand a spoon in, or when Clint and Natasha played cards and spun pennies on the table as chips. Or when someone had got Jarvis to programme some tunes from his time that they thought he’d like and every single damn song reminded him of Bucky- Bucky dragging him dancing with some girls, he and Bucky and the Commandoes in some billet somewhere when they’d put on a bit of light entertainment, the scratch of old gramophone records.

 

Steve didn’t listen to music much.

 

No, seeing the headstone shouldn’t affect him as much as those things that happened every day, sometimes every hour on really bad days, but he still didn’t want to take the risk that it might- and if it was going to bother him he didn’t want some lackey taking notes and reporting back to Fury and whoever else felt like they owned him because they pulled him out of the ice. Or that they knew him already based on propaganda movies he’d shot and comic books they’d made of him.

 

Steve didn’t really need to go to Arlington anyway. Bucky wasn’t there, it was just a headstone. He lay back in bed and imagined just walking out of the tower and keeping walking. If he tried it for real someone would spot him, someone would follow him or ask him where he was going, but in his head there was no one there to do that. No one to keep an eye on him, not even JARVIS. He walked block by block, the new skyscrapers and flash billboards getting muddled with what he expected to see. He walked to Brooklyn.

 

He walked to their old apartment, stood outside picturing it now- replaced by some new apartment block full of people who listened to strange music and surfed the internet and didn’t speak to their neighbours, and he thought of their old run down space with its orange-crate furniture and weird draughts that seemed to creep through even when they used cardboard to fill the gaps in the windowpane. He felt the chill all the way down to his too thin hands and too-tight lungs.

 

In his head, Steve walked to Brooklyn in shoes with holes in them and cried.


End file.
